November 23, 2023 - 6:40pm
One has to almost admire Guy Verhofstadt. He is an enemy of Brexit and an arch-federalist, but he doesn’t hide his intentions behind weasel words. He wants to extinguish national sovereignty and he doesn’t mind who knows it
In fact, he’s put together a plan for further EU integration. Snappily entitled, “Report on proposals of the European Parliament for the amendment of the Treaties”, it proposes to massively restrict the right of member states to veto EU measures. Other features include the “establishment of a defence union including military units […] under the operational command of the Union”; exclusive EU “competence” (i.e. control) over environment and climate policy; and a “strengthening” of the “Union’s common immigration policy”.
Surely, something so radical would fall at the first hurdle. After all, even at the heart of Europe, Verhofstadt is a bit of an outlier, isn’t he?
Apparently not. This week the European Parliament voted in favour of his proposals by 291 to 274. That’s not enough to make them law: treaty change would require the unanimous approval of all 27 member states. Nevertheless, the idea that full-blown federalism is a minority pursuit, or a Brexiteer conspiracy theory, is blatantly wrong. The Verhofstadt view of the EU’s future commands a majority among the Union’s directly elected politicians.
Ironically, the European Parliament voted for the Verhofstadt plan on the same day that the Netherlands held its general election. As the results made clear, the Dutch people — though generally liberal and internationalist by temperament — have had enough of European and global elites overriding national priorities.
And it isn’t “just” the voters expressing their frustration. For instance, Michel Barnier, best known to Brits as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, has just reiterated his desire for French control over immigration to France. This week we also heard from Donald Tusk, a former president of the European council and likely next prime minister of Poland. He made it clear that his party would be opposing the Verhofstadt plan. He has also been quoted as saying that “one of the reasons why the UK left the EU was this naive, sometimes even unbearable euro-enthusiasm, which was transformed into projects that changed the character of the EU”.
That’s an interesting comment from someone who once said there was a “special place in Hell” for “those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely”.
But, of course, even the most clueless of Brexiteers had a perfectly sensible plan — which was to get away from the unbearable euro-enthusiasts first and then work out what to do afterwards. If you’re stuck in a room with a lunatic, that is the logical order of priorities.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeWhat a surprise. Politicians voting to give themselves more power. We all know it will never happen.
Speak for yourself. Whether the ludicrous Guy Verhofstadt gets his way next week or whether it takes years, the EU must reach political union or it will collapse.
This must either happen for the EU, or the EU must die trying. The Euro forces this to be true: a currency union must operate within a political union.
Or it could just drop the whole political union and become a trade block like the CPTTP or NAFTA/USMCA.
That was the line we were sold at the first referendum;
‘No loss of sovereignty, just a trading block’
Or indeed EFTA.
When you find yourself in a madhouse, your first priority should be to get out and then deal with things from the safety of that position.
But it is and always has been fundamentally a political union and stepping back from this objective would be intolerable to the EU elite.
Like the EEC that we actually joined and would probably have remained a member of had it not stealthily metamorphosed into the monster it is now.
Not an option for the Euro nations. Pulling the whole Project back to a trade bloc only would mean the end of the Euro, and the EU could not survive the death of the Euro.
My guess is that the currency dies first.
You are seeing member states coming closer and closer to voting to leave the Union.
In fact, I could easily see another organization form between states that chose to leave the EU. Maybe Hungary, Poland, Britain join with Turkey It would not be that hard for Hungary and Poland to revert to their own currencies, Turkey and Britain already have them. Oddly, I could even see the Dutch bail. With the right arrangements, I could see Greece drop out. If Greece were to see an alternative alliance they might decide it is worth getting the EU off their back.
Unlike the United States, which decided in 1867 that once your in you are in and there is no getting out, the EU has the precedent of Brexit. Plus, the US was already a single nation with one federal government. The EU is more like a club with an annoying board.
If that happens? Then the EU becomes a shell of itself, always having to consider how much smaller it might get if it aggravates another member state enough.
BTW….you are NEVER gonna get the Germans or the French to go along with a strait up federal system.
In the US, it means that wealthy states like NY and CA subsidize poorer states like AR or LA.
Do you see Germany or France being willing to transfer money to other southern states?
The US has another advantage, the senate. Each state has two senators regardless of their size which means that each state has an equal influence on legislation despite the differences in the House. Do you see states like Germany or Spain or France being willing to accept Finland having the same number of votes in a bicameral legislature?
And, despite their differences, the US states are very much alike. You go into any major American city you know you are in an American city. NYC is not Charlotte is not Tampa is not Portland, but each and every one of them has a strong thread of American culture. That is not now and never will be true in Europe.
You are just never going to get a federalized Europe. There are too many cultures and too much national pride and too much skepticism of a federal body. There are too many countries unwilling to pay the price. The US fell into it, they had no idea when they set out precisely how it would all work. But there is no way you could do that again today. There is no way Texas or California or NY would agree to subsidize TN or KY. They gripe now about the amount of money that comes back to them from the federal taxes they pay. Texas would never risk having NY or CA set their social policy and vice versa.
And they had to have a civil war (I think it was the bloodiest war to that date) to settle the issue of federal control. Not sure that Brussels has the troops to impose its will.
…it was the bloodiest War they ever fought, with casualties exceeding those they suffered in WW1 and WW2 combined…and combatants more than ten times more likely to be killed than in Vietnam…
The rich states already are subsidising the poorer states. Germany has always been a net payer. France is (finally). We always were. Ireland will be. That was built into the EU from the start. This is just a discussion about how much the damage is.
Smaller countries are arguably already over-represented as commission jobs (these have the real power) are divvied up by country and not by country size.
But I agree – at some point, France and Germany will need to remain a de facto veto. Which if nothing else changes they will lose as the EU expands.
Perhaps in the past, but not now. Neither country has any prospect of creating a budget surplus in the foreseeable future. To continue to make the fiscal transfers necessary to keep the whole ramshackle show on the road they’ll have to print money on an unprecedented scale. Argentina here we come.
“Do you see Germany or France being willing to transfer money to other southern states?”
No, but I see them transferring the money unwillingly, through the Target2 system. Presently the transfers are officially regarded as loans on the balance sheets of the creditor nations, but nobody seriously believes that those loans are ever getting repaid. I suspect that the EU’s strategy is simply to let these balances grow until the creditor nations have no choice but to accept that fiscal transfers are politically more palatable than the destabilising effect of keeping assets on the books that are not in fact assets at all.
I’m not sure you can really call that a “strategy” ! But I think you’re correct here.
They already massively subsidise the poorer countries.
Hmm. Go into any European city in 20 years time – if we don’t change course – and you’ll know that you’re in an Islamic city.
None of the EU citizens want political union as it’s clear that their democratic rights will entirely disappear, that’s why the Trumps and Verhofstadts are elected. And why isn’t Van Leyen in court for breaching EU purchasing rules and using texts (since deleted) to close a 30B€ deal with Bourla? That’s why political union stinks, because too many of the politicians stink.
Never? Time is on their side, isn’t it? They’ll be back to try again and again. The beauty of an adverserial system is that one side knocks back the bad ideas of the other. There’s no such thing in the EU. Just creepy consensus straight down the line.
For these people “more power” is just what the doctor ordered. It’ll be Ming the Merciless in a (uni-sex) Chanel suit. That’s the plan.
These people live in a bubble – totally disconnected from the plebs around them.
and they will wonder why right wing parties (extreme, far,…) win elections.
“Far right” by the news media is already a tired act.
They are completely tone deaf. And that will be their doom.
That will not stop them from shaping your future — for your own good it goes without sayng.
“These people…” referring to whom, I pray.
And why does such assertion without context gets so many upvotes?
Are the Leavers permitted to say ‘we told you so’ yet? Or are we still being nagged by the naive, sometimes even unbearable euro-enthusiasts?
Oh no! Don’t you understand that if only Britain hadn’t left the EU, the EU wouldn’t have any of these problems? Not only are Britain’s problems the fault of Brexit voters, so too are the EU’s problems.
🙂
Strong parallels to the way the SNP views the English
Have we really escaped from the grip of the unbearable euro-enthusiasts? Seems to me that the British establishment is full of them – all pining to return to their sophisticated friends across the water and escape from their own unbearable countrymen.
The French long ago gave up any pretence of balancing the books. The Germans are now doing the same – abandoning limits on public debt that were, until very recently, enshrined in law. Italy has had no growth at all since adopting the euro. There are massive imbalances in the cross-border settlements system know as Target 2.
It will be interesting to see how long this can go on before the entire edifice starts to collapse.
The goal of the EU superstate is built into the EU’s foundation Treaty of Rome. Remainers’ striking ignorance about the EU is a deliberate manoeuvre so they can kid themselves that the superstate is a paranoid Leaver myth.
You have to give Nigel Farage credit for warning about the bureaucratic overreach inherent in the EU with his “Who are you speech”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bypLwI5AQvY
The author needs a wider canvass for this kind of discussion.
The sovereign nation state was invented at peace treaties signed in 1648 in the Westphalian Euroregion that to put an end to the religious wars of the period. The keynote was Sovereignty.
However, the Treaty failed to stop nations going to war against one another ever since.
The article also needs a widened concept of general knowledge. For coherent discussion in this fundamentally important political field we need the help of relevant mentors. The field can be specified as the quest for Perpetual Peace. Several major thinkers left records of their deliberations to us in the last five hundred years. I point to one of the relatively modern and competent ones (according to my knowledge) as Mortimer J Adler’s How to Think About War and Peace (https://ia801500.us.archive.org/23/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.515847/2015.515847.How-To.pdf)
It is simply a response to the new geopolitical reality. In a de-globalising world of competing spheres of influence, Europe must be able to defend itself, its integrity and its interests without the need for America. The world has moved on. As competition hots up for resources, so free trade will diminish and supply chains will become more fragile. Britain needs to decide which block it wants to be part of – the EU/ Europe or America. The idea of becoming some kind of ‘buccaneering’ free agent is for the birds.
Good luck to them. More please. Britain has shown that a country on its own is an economic failure. We’re only showing them how not to do it.
But, of course, even the most clueless of Brexiteers had a perfectly sensible plan — which was to get away from the unbearable euro-enthusiasts first and then work out what to do afterwards.
Have they? I think I’ve been sleeping for a few years.
As it becomes more and more obvious Brexit a total waste of time with little to no benefit inevitable we get Articles on UnHerd, (which of course supported and funded by Brexiteers) looking for justification.
Yet even the Article can’t avoid the reality that the Nation states within the EU won’t agree to what the EU Parliament suggests and it’ll get parked by the Council of Ministers and existing veto’s. Hardly a surprise a legislature votes to acquire more powers to itself is it – ours looks to do that too, but it’s not the sole determinant is it and there are, and always were, other checks and balances. Of which the range of Veto’s and exemptions we had was unique until we got carried away with twaddle.
7 years on and counting – nobody else left. 7 years on and counting the list of Countries looking to join has grown. Now various reasons for that, not all benign, but nonetheless we remain an example and it’s not a great one.
Your comments suggest that you view the democratic uplift from Brexit as unimportant – or even non-existent. If so, you will struggle to converse in any meaningful way on this topic.
I’d be interested to hear your views …
We had to Leave IB. How and in what fashion much more of a debate.
But regardless no Vote means silence and calling out a fundamental mistake v important.
More broadly re: democratic uplift – did you Vote to treble net migration? I suspect not. Some uplift.
You have to be kind to him. He found the whole thing so traumatic he has lost all sense of reason
Can I assume by “him” you meant J Watson?
I think so
“Democratic uplift”?? Party politics is not democracy.
A major decision on such a tiny majority is a travesty of democracy.
Brexit was more like a gang of fish stampeding the rest so they can be dominant in a smallish pond.
These remarks are not very convincing in view of the contents of the article.
“Take back control” was a slogan that resonated powerfully with large swathes of the British public. I’m sure that many of us are heartily sick of being increasingly voiceless, as we see ever greater areas of policy-making hived off to national and supranational bodies of varying descriptions; heroically manned by “independent experts”; appointed by God knows who and God knows how; enthusiastically applauded by demosphobes the world over. But in reality, these entities are manned by people who are neither independent nor expert. If we were in any doubt about that, we need look no further than the currently parlous state of the UK and many other Western democracies. Indeed, these experts could hardly have performed worse. In this context Brexit was a start, not an end; necessary but not sufficient. On its own, it was never going to deliver a meaningful democratic resurgence.
I can’t see that I or my children would be materially worse off in a European super state. And I’d have my freedom of movement and ability to export unhindered. We have no democratic accountability and under the FPTP Uniparty in this country anyway. Why not be part of a powerful single power? That aspect of EU membership never bothered me in the slightest. “Why don’t you b*gger off if you don’t like this country?” I hear you all cry… well, I can’t now can I?
I think you can. If you really want to.
Because that powerful single power is unelected and corrupt, as in the European Commission where all the decisions are made.
UnHerd supported and funded by Brexiteers?? Are the majority of writers “Little Englanders”?
The responses below confirm that.
Another reason for cancelling my membership.
Just not federalists, that’s all.
The countries looking to join are all expecting to be large net beneficiaries from the EU. Why wouldn’t they join up for a sack of free cash ?
We, on the other hand, were underwriting all these subsidies. Money we largely can and should have invested looking after people in the UK, rather than yet more international aid.
It should now be clear that the EU is evolving in a direction that doesn’t suit the UK. Indeed will not suit Germany or France if it continues unchecked. Even if you think the settlement with the EU was OK in 2016, it certainly would have become far less so in the future. In fact, I can recall reading exactly that view in the FT before June 2016 (the FT hardly being a pro-Brexit paper).
We’ve seriously got to start looking after our own people and interests and tone down the international do-gooding role that we’ve been wasting too much time and effort on.
PB I think this is the fundamental fallacy – that somehow the EU is an entity that can’t change. If it starts to fail the likes of Germany and France it’ll change for sure and one can already see this. And had we remained we’d have led that IMO with strong allies in a number of countries. Instead we stropped off.
As it is of course we’ve ended up now shadowing/tracking EU laws with less say. We’ve ended up with much more net migration, where those coming also less likely to return than EU workers were, and with a bigger cultural difference too. That looking after ours first?
In the meantime we can’t travel and work as freely. Now to be fair I do now have a Blue Passport and I look at it for longer when queued waiting for a stamp in every EU airport I pass through. I guess a dividend of sorts. Struggling for much more aren’t we. And just imagine all the problems we could have focused on without this psycho-drama. The ‘opportunity-cost’ been immense.
I don’t see how the non-EU net migration is necessarily related to Brexit. That is something within our power in the UK to control. The fact that is has increased over the past few years is down to government policy (or rather, the government following a very different policy than the one it was elected to do). Whether they would have done the same if Brexit had never happened isn’t possible to say.
Not related? Who’d you think replaced all the Polish or other EU care workers when they went home? Yes we went to India or some other Asian or African country.
Who’s desperate not to offend India or a range of other non EU countries because we’re desperate for trade deals and thus haven’t clamped down as much as we could?
Who thought the Brexit freedoms would somehow miracle away our demographics and transform our industrial model and thus never took any long term actions to reduce any need for high migration? – the opportunity cost from such wasted time never clearer.
Govt policy is a direct consequence of Brexit, not the ignoring of it. Inevitable.
But there are well over a million people who are economically inactive in the UK who could be doing some of these jobs. We have constructed an employment, benefit and tax system where that’s possible. That’s a choice that governments made. It can be changed. Immigration is not the only or unique solution.
Note also that automation and robotics will fill some of the labour gaps. Japan are far more advanced along this path than we are.
The best responses here are to innovate and not continue lowering our national GDP per head whilst bragging that immigration slightly increases nominal GDP and ignoring the pyramid scheme nature of such an approach (since the future pension and other liabilities are never costed in that analysis).
Why would we not want trade deals with countries like India ? The whole point of trade is that it’s based on comparative advantage and inherently “win-win”. Not “zero sum” as so many seem to assume (indeed your comment about India seems to be written that way).
Brexit was indeed an opportunity for Britain to refocus on what is really important for its future. Things – as you rightly point out – like how we manage our demographics and future welfare spending. This is all stuff we would have to do anyway. Brexit provided a “step change” shock to the system that should have made it possible to start taking those decisions.
I actually agree with many of your sentiments, if not always your proposed solutions. But the sort of changes you want will not be achieved by continuity and concensus. If the people and methods we’ve used for the past 30 odd years could have solved these problems, we’d have seen some actual progress. They cannot.